MangoCats

They had a pretty rough go when beaver hats were in fashion...

Some people care, but not enough yet: https://eowilsonfoundation.org/what-is-the-half-earth-project/

That was a company of 1000 employees, over 500 of them in the traveling global sales force. There were about seven guys at the top taking home millions a year in those bonuses, and their whole priority was to maximize their personal incomes as much and as soon as possible.

In the shiny promotional videos, we were all about helping our customers, improving their lives, but in reality we weren't very good at that, only about 1/3 customers saw any benefits and maybe 3/100 would get anything close to what they were really hoping for, but... they didn't have any alternatives, so they were willing to let their health insurance pay for a $30K surgical procedure on the chance that they might be one of the lucky ones.

Research around methods of testing to determine who might and who might not benefit from the product? Actively undermined by the company.

Research around ways to improve product performance? Squashed as I described, it was more likely to "disrupt" the short term income streams they leaders were all enjoying than to make any significant improvements in income for them on any time schedule they care about.

I think he was unexpectedly successful in winning the 2016 election.

I also think that by mid 2017 "his" administration had built up collection of "advisors" who have been increasingly calling the shots since then. They give him "on brand" scripts to read, but he's not personally orchestrating much of anything.

This is nothing new for Google, compliance with local laws...

As a business, they're respecting the current US administration - probably weighing the likelihood of penalties depending on which side of the US legal system they choose to obey.

I have spent 30 years developing computerization of traditional medical tasks. Anytime a project gets anywhere near M.D. territory they villify it mercilessly, it's a threat to their cash cow, a threat to their status as the exalted font of all knowledge, a threat to their $600K/yr practice income - they think.

Doesn't even have to be about that. Einstein was a disruptor. He scribbled some theories on paper and it dramatically reshaped the global power and wealth dynamic.

The extremely rich have a singular top priority: to stay that way. Unpredictable change, regardless of the net change for good or bad, is not their friend.

This works at all levels. I was hired into the mid level of a company to "lead research to improve the product" - but I quickly found out: that was just a carrot to get me and others like me in the door to fill roles required by regulatory bodies: so many degreed this and thats to oversee implementation of the quality procedures, etc. Everyone above Director level in that company was making fat bonuses every quarter and they didn't want ANYTHING to change, not even an improvement in the product, it was making plenty of money with no signs of competition on the horizon. To announce a potential future improvement would be to derail current sales volumes, and there were new mansions under construction that still needed more quarters of bonuses to complete.

This was outlined 50 years ago as part of Anarchist analysis of the system then. Not exactly an easy read, but "the second watershed" can be equated to "jumping the shark" or "enshittification" or whatever other term you want to apply to: a good thing gone bad due to the business owners switching from serving customers to enriching / empowering themselves:

https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality/page/9/mode/1up

The alternative proposed by Illich to "Radical Monopolies" are "Convivial Tools" which empower individuals instead of central decision makers.

I actually tried Tox - maybe 8 years ago now... the real problem with it, or anything similar, is that you need both ends of every conversation to take the trouble to set it up. It was pretty easy to setup, IMO, but... as an example, in 2005 I had an engineer co-worker ask me about "that Linux thing" when I got around to telling him that pretty much everything he used on a daily basis was available in Linux, just under different names than he was used to in Windows "Oh, you mean I'd have to learn different names for Word and Excel and Outlook?" "Uh, yeah." "Oh, that's more trouble than I think I want, I'll just stick with what I know."

In the 1990s US ISPs would "give you" an e-mail account with their service: you@isp.com. Of course, this is insta-lockin for that e-mail address, you can never port it.

Owning your own domain name and running e-mail service through that worked, for a few years, but the big players have made whitelist / blacklist such a frustrating whack-a-mole game in the e-mail space that running your own e-mail server quickly became impractical.

Shortcut question: What's a workable federated e2ee solution that's available today? Quantum secure? Metadata secure?

I've met both US Senators from Florida a couple of years before they got in the Senate. Neither of them gave the slightest impression of being a leader, in charge of their own destiny, or even a servant of the people. They were both just performers on a publicity tour, slaves to their schedules and scripts.